Fintech infrastructure company Geopagos snags $35M in funding – TechCrunch

Geopagos, a payments infrastructure startup based in Buenos Aires, has raised $35 million in a round led by Riverwood Capital.The financing marks the companys first ever institutional funding. Founded in 2013, the Argentinian startup serves as a white label infrastructure software provider, with the aim of giving businesses the ability to launch financial services.Today, Geopagos has a presence in 15 Latin American countries and says it facilitates more than 150 million transactions with a processed volume of $5 billion per year.It promises to help companies that want to create and/or scale a payment acceptance business an unmatched time to market and the possibility of, under the white label modality, integrating all functions from the acceptance of all payment methods to the visualization of all transactions, regardless of the method of payment that has been used to collect.In a nutshell, Geopagos feels it is in the ideal position of being able to serve as the software enabler that can retrofit incumbents like large banks and launch the enablers like fintechs.Indeed, customers include large financial institutions, fintechs, retailers and software companies, among others. The company also has several software offerings, including Tap to Phone, which N\xfa\xf1ez Castro said is seeing massive interest regionally.There is no question that Latin America is a large, underpenetrated card market estimated to be at 28% versus 63% in the U.S. Sign up here to get it in your inbox.Geopagos has about 350 employees, mostly in IT/technical roles, according to N\xfa\xf1ez Castro, and hired over 100 people in the last year alone.Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founder and managing partner of Riverwood Capital, noted that his firm has for years been focused on developing relationships with, and investing, in the fintech infrastructure companies that are behind the continued technology adoption trends it sees in fintech globally.In particular, Latin America historically has been significantly under-penetrated on payment card adoption. This is an endemic issue that is partially solved by the emergence of the neobanks on the card issuing/banking side of the equation with record amounts of funding over the last couple of years but it also requires substantial innovation on the card acceptance side, he wrote via email.Geopagos, in Riverwoods view, powers such innovation in turn, helping its clients drive digital inclusion in payments all across the region.As global growth investors and active tech investors in Latin America for the past 14+ years, we engage and evaluate dozens of opportunities in this space, Alvarez-Demalde added.